Conversational Marketing Blog features BJ Cook's insights on digital marketing strategies and social media. As customer experiences cross over from web to mobile to offline; we assess who gets it and who needs some help.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

So if you don't know what Twitter is, it's a micro-blogging tool to keep people updated on what you're doing. Simpler than that ... You can post endless 140 character posts on what you're doing and people follow your activity.

So I loaded my Tweet Cloud again to see where my textual relevance laid. Check out my cloud here. I'm going to break it down into categories to see if there is anything interesting at all :)

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

This post is very timely as we're just finishing up our taxes for 2007; yes we filed an extension. One of the key areas is "donations." So I had to flip through emails from all of 2007 to find the ones that were receipts for online donations I had made to organizations that I've been supporting like American Forests, Eleho.org and others. What if you were like me and weren't the best at keeping it all in one spreadsheet or one notebook? Enter Razoo Donations ...I was invited to test out this alpha version of their new platform for giving to your favorite organizations online. When I went to the alpha website it had these red and blue tabs at the top directing you to Giving Opportunities and keeping your total giving in plain sight; always in a way reminding you how much or little you've given. I definitely see some type of psychological tug of the heart strings within the placement of this key data point. If you're also the kind of person who needs to part with more money towards the end of the year and you need a quick release of cash, this updating data point can shed some light on how much more there is to give.

The next feature is the Giving Guides where Razoo can lead you to a bundle of organizations based on the type of cause you're looking for whether Human Rights, Microfunding and more. I really like this feature and see them leveraging this area to actually recommend organizations to you based on some type of filtering tool where you could choose NPOs (nonprofit organizations) based on geo-targeting, topic matters, similar portfolio holders or your spending patterns.

Razoo Donations has also solidified its back-end by partnering with Network For Good, a popular organization database and funding network. If Razoo wants to truly gain my adoption, I'd recommend looking at tools like Mint.com and MailChimp.com for their UI design and UX frameworks. Their dashboards are some of the best, their data points are truly valuable and their graphs are juicy!

Being in the customer feedback and interaction space, I wanted to touch upon Razoo's dedication to gaining insights from alpha testers and having a mechanism for collecting that feedback. I was presented with the following SurveyMonkey URL and took it upon myself to provide Sebastian and the Razoo team with my undivided feedback.

Though I know the team and worked with them in the past, I would definitely recommend the SuggestionBox platform as a way to capture insight, BUT be able to respond to people based on individual features to build fulfillment and therefore gain a platform for re-connecting with these people down the road as their ideas get implemented. Aside from that blatant promotion, Razoo Donations can truly be an effective tool for Donators and keeping all of their giving in one place. Your donation portfolio is here.